Whispers in the Dark
by ImpalaLove
Summary: SPOILERS for 11x01. Amara and Dean have a little talk (because I can't leave well enough alone).
1. Chapter 1

**11x01 tag. Meant to get this out earlier, but I wasn't totally happy with it yet. This whole storyline is super intriguing to me, and I wanted to make sure to get it right.**

* * *

Whispers in the Dark

They meet under cover of darkness, and Dean almost laughs at the irony of it.

"I like your smile," she purrs, stepping out from the shadows. The smile she mentioned fades, but he has to force it to leave his lips, and that bothers him. He shouldn't be happy to see her again. He _shouldn't_. This is just business, just gathering intel until he understands enough to destroy her.

"You wanted to talk?" she prompts when he says nothing. She slinks up to him like one of the shadows splayed along the wall and stands at a distance that should be uncomfortably close, but isn't. It's close enough that he can feel that energy he tried to describe to Sam—that complete _focus_ that radiates out from her in waves; ocean lapping at the shore. Dean supposes that makes him the sand.

"I just...want to understand." This is the truth. Dean desperately wants to know more. To know _her_. Her intentions, her reasoning, her desires. He tells himself it's because she's evil, because he has to find a chink in her immortal armor and use it to his advantage. He tells himself that all he wants is to kill the Darkness.

"You understand more than you give yourself credit for," Amara croons, shifting even closer so that her breath whispers against his lips. "You can feel it, can't you? How deep it all runs? It's okay."

She reaches out slowly, and he lets her, forgetting to breathe as her fingers brush against his cheek, down to his collarbone. She's right. He feels it. He's not sure what _it_ is, but there is something that runs along the edges of her fingers and zig-zags its way through the sharp planes of his face, spreading throughout his entire body like a shiver of electricity, a spark of power that tastes like something between life and death. Dean catches her hand with his own, but keeps it close to his chest, staring at her. She stares back.

"What do you want?" he asks finally, letting her hand drop. She examines her own fingers, as if his touch has changed them somehow.

"It's not that complicated, Dean," she says, letting her gaze drift back to his face. "I want what everyone wants. I want to be safe. I want to be allowed to stay here without the constant threat of an ending waiting for me the moment I take a step."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got. And unfortunately, that's all the time you have to ask."

Dean's eyes narrow and he reaches for the gun in his jeans automatically, despite knowing it won't do much good against a force like her. Amara laughs and shakes her head, and Dean is thrown by the sound of it, a low rumble from her chest. He stops reaching for the gun.

"That's not what I meant," Amara says, still shaking her head, as if gently scolding a wayward child. "I just meant that Sam will be waking soon. And you will want to return before that happens."

"When…" Dean blinks, and Amara is gone, just another shadow sliding along the wall once more. He clicks his teeth together and rolls his tongue over them, still frozen with fingers half-reaching for the colt at his back. It takes him another long moment to shift from his position, to straighten up and start walking back the way he had come. It is still dark out and Sam should still be sleeping, but Dean doesn't question Amara's insistence that he will awaken soon. Sleep is a luxury that comes in short spurts for both of them these days.

Dean reaches their latest motel and takes his time opening the door, making sure not to wake his brother. Sam is a restless heap in the far bed and he shifts upon his brother's entrance, but doesn't wake. Dean toes off his boots and rolls back onto his own thin mattress, knowing he won't be sleeping anymore tonight. It's not because of anything Amara said. She didn't say much of anything anyway. And though Dean still can't quite wrap his head around having a conversation with Darkness itself, that's not what bothers him.

He shifts onto his back and stares up at the blank ceiling, counting breaths and blinks and trying not to think about the question he had been about to ask before Amara disappeared. Because that is what scares him more than anything. It is not Amara's unknown intentions, nor the destruction she is bound to cause that has Dean shifting again, this time rolling onto his stomach and burying his face into an uncharacteristically soft pillow. It is that, in an encounter with God's oldest curse, Dean's most pressing question had been:

 _When will I see you again?_

* * *

 **Thanks for reading, and please leave your thoughts if you have the time!**


	2. Chapter 2

_CHAPTER 2_

 **So I got a request to do an expansion on this and when I went back to reread, I realized that I wrote Dean and Sam at a motel, but at the end of 12x01, Dean was bringing Jenna and baby Amara to safety and Sam was frickin' dying from being infected by the Darkness. Sooo we'll just call this semi-AU and we'll also pretend it's all set after 12x02 when the brothers are reunited…and apparently it takes them an extra night in a motel to get back to the bunker. Oops. Details.**

* * *

Sam wakes, and he's not sure why.

There is no aftertaste of a nightmare, no heaves of flustered breath that come with bad dreams. This he knows well, and that is not what woke him (though he can still almost feel the slime of thick, black veins crawling up his skin, can still see quite clearly how close he came to dying. Again). But right now, that's not it. And it's not the temperature of the room, the fullness of his bladder, the sharpness of passing headlights, nor the rumble of a car rolling along the highway, either.

Everything is silent, including the man who lays in the bed beside his own with his face buried in a pillow, his breaths muffled but steady. Sam listens to that sound for a while, Dean's slow, comforting inhale-exhale, ears straining for something else, anything that might've torn him from restfulness. But there is nothing. So Sam rolls over again, and he sleeps.

Sam wakes again much later on, this time to a thin stream of sunlight creeping in through crooked blinds. He blinks against it, is about to shift and face the other way when he notices Dean, frozen stiff and staring at the ceiling, as if waiting for it to fall on him. His hands are clasped behind his head, eyes open but vacant, carried off on some current of thought Sam would be lucky to know, but probably never will.

He watches Dean for a moment, so caught up inside his own head that for once, he doesn't notice Sam looking at him. That is, until Sam shifts slightly, rustling the sheets. And suddenly, Dean is Dean again, soul flown back to his body in a rush of knowing that Sam is awake, that Dean needs to be his brother now—strong and stoic and unshakeable. But Sam has known him long enough and well enough.

He has seen Dean shake.

Dean smiles at him, hands pushing out to each side of the headboard in what Sam would be convinced was a real, just-waking-up stretch if he didn't know better.

"Morning," Dean says, rolling out of bed and heading straight for the bathroom. Sam lets out a long sigh and turns to face the ceiling Dean had been staring at so intently.

He wishes he could see the remnants of his brother's thoughts, projected there like some kind of weird movie. But it is a blank white, and somehow Sam knows Dean's thoughts were directed toward the opposite.

* * *

Dean lets Sam drive the rest of the way back to the bunker, eyes thick with the sleep he wasn't able to find last night after his meeting with Amara. He is on edge, skin tingling and fingers tapping against the dash while Sam drives and tries not to comment on it. Dean can tell his brother is a little worried, knows he wasn't able to cover the wild wanderings of his own thoughts this morning. If it hadn't been for Sam, he'd have left his toothpaste behind at the motel.

"Dean," Sam says. That's the whole sentence. Most of it means: _Please, for the love of god, stop tapping the dashboard like that_ , but another, deeper part means _What the hell's wrong with you now? Just talk to me._ Dean reads both parts well enough, but only chooses to acknowledge the former. He stops the insane rhythm he'd been keeping, lets his hands fall to land softly on his knees, shooting Sam an almost-apologetic-but-mostly-smug smirk. A moment later, he surrenders to the familiar leather of the seat, angling his body so that his head rests against the passenger window. He closes his eyes.

"Sleeping?" Sam asks, a little bewildered.

"Not yet," Dean mumbles sarcastically, burrowing deeper into the seat. He doesn't have to look to know that Sam has rolled his eyes.

"Obviously." A pause. Then: "You alright, man? You seem out of it today."

If Dean's eyes weren't already closed, he'd be rolling them right back at his brother; standard defense mechanism. As it is, he keeps them shut and gives a half-hearted, upward hitch of the shoulder not crammed against the door. "Just tired."

He thinks Sam probably nods, but he doesn't check. He drifts.

And she comes to him again.

"Dean." She says it so different from the way Sam does. It slides soft and fluid from her tongue, coasting out into the air and hovering there, all misty edges. It's dark here, just a few stars managing to shine through the thin veil of clouds above his head. Dean doesn't want to be here ( _he doesn't, he doesn't_ ), doesn't want to feel whatever this is, so he doesn't look at Amara. He looks down.

They are standing in the middle of a lake.

If he hadn't looked, he never would've known. But he does look, and he sees water stretched out on all sides, a wide expanse of a blue so dark it looks black. He inhales a sharp, startled breath, body immediately locking up in anticipation of a plunge into icy waters.

It never comes.

He just hovers there, the shifting of his weight on suddenly unsteady feet making a few small ripples across the water and nothing else. Amara stands beside him, too close as usual, smiling in that way of hers at his reaction.

"Sorry," she murmurs. "Didn't mean to scare you. Just wanted to find a nice place to chat."

"Nice?" Dean chokes. He takes a step away from her because he feels like he should, surveying the black-blueness. The lake is huge, the shoreline barely visible from where they stand, a place Dean judges to be almost the exact center. A faded outline of trees stands along the edges, partially obscured by a thin layer of fog and by the darkness that surrounds them both (and oh, the irony). Hesitantly, he looks down again, shifting his toes inside his boots so that a few small waves ripple out from beneath his feet, spiraling out and out until they are lost, just another coupling of drops falling back into the natural, albeit lethargic flow of the lake.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Amara asks, watching him. Dean stops the awed parting of his lips that had begun at the realization that he was _standing on water_ , mouth snapping shut as he turns to face her again. She isn't looking at him anymore, her eyes now cast out over the lake as she speaks.

"The way the ripples pool out? The way one tiny wiggling of toes can extend so far, far beyond what we can even begin to see." She turns back to look at him, her long black dress sweeping along the surface of the water, leaving an intricate pattern of furrows in its wake. "You began one of those ripples, Dean. When you accepted the Mark. When you joined us together. Maybe you didn't realize it at the time, because it all reached so far beyond yourself, but this was always how it was meant to happen. _You_ were always going to be the key that unlocked the future."

Dean swallows and shakes his head, feeling the remnants of an angel's firm grip around the collar of his shirt from what feels like a million years ago.

 _Here's what gonna happen. You're gonna suck it up, accept your responsibilities, and play the roles that destiny has chosen for you._

Hears the Devil in his ear, a lightning storm in Detroit.

 _We will always end up here._

Dean taps his feet again and watches the tiny currents he creates on the water, and he's tired. Tired of being _chosen,_ tired of being dragged around by every supernatural force that ever thought it had some kind of claim on him, some _bigger than you, bigger than all of us_ reason for making his choices for him. He's tired of fighting against it, falling back into it, never being able to fully separate himself from the evil he hunts.

"And what kind of future is that?" Dean finally asks.

Amara smiles. Dean isn't looking at her, but he can feel the shift in her expression. "Mine," she says. "And yours, if you want it. We can share it. Together."

Dean whips his head up at that, eyes narrowing. "Well I don't. I don't want that."

He's not sure if he means it, so before he can think about it too hard, he's walking away, his footsteps leaving indents across the lake. Walking isn't enough, so he picks up the pace, almost running now, feet falling hard enough that he can feel droplets of water splashing at his heels like the sloppy tongue of a hellhound. And suddenly, that's exactly what it is. A hellhound. Yet another beast with a claim on his soul, and now he's sprinting over the shifting water, breaths sharp and heavy and he'll never escape it all, can never run fast enough or far enough and….

He's awake.

They're pulled up at a gas station, engine off and little brother absent. Dean shifts to find him at the convenience store counter, and he's glad Sam has somehow chosen this moment to not be in the car beside him. He knows he wasn't subtle about awakening from a nightmare ( _that's what it was, right?_ ), and Dean doesn't want the questions that will come. He doesn't think he'd be able to answer most of them anyway. He's only just gotten his breathing under control by the time Sam makes his way back to the car, sliding his long body into the driver's seat. Sam sees that Dean's awake and smiles as he shuts the door behind him.

"Sleep good?"

* * *

 **A big thank you to Kathwinchester for the request and for being so patient with me while I figured out how the heck to expand this! I'm always looking for writing inspiration, so any prompts and requests are always welcome, and I will always do my best to make them happen.**

 **Thanks for reading!**


	3. Chapter 3

It's stuffy here.

She likes some parts of this new home of hers, but no matter how many ornate candlesticks and musty mirrors are arranged inside what has come to be referred to as her room, Amara still feels crowded. Unfree. And she has lived most of her existence in such a state, locked away, so as much as she appreciates the endless food supply and infinite source of information about this new world all crowded into a tiny device called a 'laptop,' she's pretty sure she won't be staying here much longer.

And Crowley is...interesting. She like that he doesn't talk to her like she's a child, despite the impossibly small human shell she's locked inside of for now. Still, he underestimates her. Perhaps in part because of her form, but also due to the fact that even the King of Hell could never quite begin to wrap his mind around the endless entity that is her.

That's okay.

Being underestimated has its advantages, and for now, she's content with this arrangement. She hopes Crowley understands when it's time for her to leave. Because when she's done with him, she'd really rather not have to kill him. She's appreciated the much-needed education, the care he's provided. And she's also fairly certain that no matter how hideously mangled it is, the tarnished remainder of his soul will be quite like all the rest- it won't satisfy her hunger.

"Every time I've taken a soul, I feel how much emptiness there is," she tells him, using a napkin to wipe the remnants of her latest meal from a child's cheeks. "God made a world where people have to suffer. And then they die."

"Unfortunately," Crowley answers, though he doesn't seem particularly upset by it. Probably because death is his time to collect.

"Frankly, why would they want to live in such a world?" she presses. But honestly, she doesn't much care for the answer.

God's brilliant plan.

It is so hideous, so flawed she's almost giddy with it. This is Brother's most prized possession, the thing He locked her away to protect, and yet it has fallen apart while she was gone. Perhaps that is why it seems He's abandoned His little project. If she'd been around, instead of barred from the rest of existence, perhaps she could've warned Him of how bored He would grow with the ugly apes who couldn't; the suffering souls who only know how to paint in hues of greed and depravity and the red, red lines of violence.

Which is why Dean Winchester is such a conundrum to her.

He embodies that same shade of red, and yet instead of making him unlovely, his skin seems to come alive with it, all hard-planed face and pupils swallowed by jungles untamed. Alone for so long, his was the first face she saw, and it is the only one she's been able to think about ever since.

She wants to meet him in every dream and every waking moment, can't resist the first visit to an abandoned alleyway, nor her concocted setting of a dark and lazy lake.

"You were always going to be the key that unlocked the future," she tells him, and she wonders why he flinches away from her instead of stepping closer.

"Don't you see?" she wants to scream at him as he begins to walk away from her, his footsteps pushing giant ripples into the surface of the lake. "I want us to have everything. Why won't you just let me show you?"

He keeps running, and in her rage she makes his dream a nightmare. She wishes it gave her satisfaction to know that he awakens shivering and panting, alone in an empty car.

It doesn't.

How strange that her only satisfaction comes with the promise of two things. The first is the destruction of God's creation, followed closely by the destruction of God Himself. She knows it will come to pass in the same way that she knows the emptiness of the cage she has spent most of existence trapped within. She lets her essence bleed into the world and infect, and she smiles at the knowledge of what is to come next.

And the second thing is one she never would've anticipated. It is the promise of seeing him again, wide-eyed and painted rich red.

Whether he wants it or not, Amara knows that Dean Winchester will be hers.

* * *

 **Fairly certain this is where I'm leaving it. There's no pretty-bow ending, and given the history of this show (and the fact that if you've seen season 11, you already know how this particular arc plays out), I think it's appropriate to cut it off here.**

 **Thank you again to those who inspired the continuation of this story and to those of you who tuned back in. It's been fun expanding. Reviews always rock my socks, but y'all know that already.**


End file.
